Last week was a wonderful week with well-wishes from old and new friends for my 65th birthday. It was good to see old and new friends at a pharmacy meeting last week and then reconnect with old friends via email and Facebook, some dating back to my high school days!!

I admit that a huge weight was lifted from my shoulders last week. Turning 65 means being eligible for Medicare. Although I’m still working and have health insurance, I also have a history of breast cancer, a “pre-existing condition” in insurance terms.

My mother taught me to always look at a job offer in total. Was it a company I wanted to work for from an ethical standpoint? Was the offer fair for the skills I had to offer? But she also taught me that even more important than the salary, was the health insurance. My brother was disabled and my mother understood even in the 1940’s how expensive healthcare would become. I was relatively healthy until 2006 when I was diagnosed with breast cancer.

I had wonderful doctors with a treatment plan involving multiple surgeries and long-term hormonal suppression therapy. I was declared “cured” in 2006 after a left mastectomy and I was lucky that it was caught early. I didn’t need any other chemotherapy or radiation but was on oral suppression therapy for six years to prevent a recurrence. Cancer put my life on pause, changing it forever.

In November 2011, five years after my doctors declared me “cured”, I applied for, and was turned down for, long-term disability insurance through my employer. This was outsourced to a third-party insurance company and I was again turned down on appeal. Although I was five years cancer-free, the insurance company indicated that I had a “pre-existing” condition which did not meet their guidelines for insurance.

I know first-hand what it was like in my 50’s to be turned down for insurance.

I don’t think that Medicare for everyone is the answer, but my personal cancer diagnosis is a “pre-existing” condition that caused me to worry that if I ever lost my job, I would be uninsurable. But now, I’m Medicare-eligible.

I work out, have no chronic medical conditions and try to eat right. I take no medications but a Vitamin D supplement every day. But it is impossible to predict what the future holds.

As of Friday, I no longer need to worry about being “uninsurable”. The National Cancer Institute (NCI) estimated in 2016 that 15.5 million people have been diagnosed with cancer and are living with that diagnosis day-to-day.

That is a lot of US citizens that could be “uninsurable” if insurance companies can deny insurance based upon the “pre-existing condition” of “cancer survivor”.

Blessings, my friend,
Agatha